children are easy targets because they are slow

CIA Fake Vaccinated Children In Order To Capture Bin Laden

Your beloved Central Intelligence Agency has been caught running around the world trying to inject brown children with dirty syringes again. Is everyone impressed? That is the kind of creativity your nation uses to “keep the peace” in this world, by setting traps for small humans who merely thought they were being vaccinated. This is bound to be excellent public relations for the many global health programs that strive to improve early childhood mortality rates:

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

So agents approached Afridi, the health official in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area that runs along the Afghan border.

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.

ttommy, ttommy, ttommy, the CIA is in the business of doing things that do not work, on an epic scale, and then lying about them.

For a prior example, recall the effort to make Castro's beard fall out.

For more pertinent examples, we still have (how many?) people in captivity, with no trial and no hearing, for years…not because they're guilty of something, and not because they're dangerous, but because it would be embarrassing to our high-ranking Intelligence and Defense officials to let them go.

The CIA needs more sunshine (and firing), not less.
~

BloviateMe

There's some baby vs. bathwater buried in this one, me-thinks.

Nothingisamiss

agree.

GregComlish

Why not just give the kids real vaccines?

HistoriCat

Give aid and comfort to the enemy??

ttommyunger

Maybe they did, who knows? I guess it will come out in the NYT tomorrow.

AJWjr.

I'll wait until I read about it in one of Murdoch's rags, thanks.

iburl

We could have purchased a lifetime supply of hummus for every person in the middle east with the money we've spent murdering innocents alone.

HistoriCat

The CIA can't keep anything under wraps! They should pretty much ask, "how will this look when it gets out?"

ttommyunger

Their entire job is nasty business. If they asked that, they would stay home, watch porn and eat Cheetos all day, like I do.

HistoriCat

Considering their record, that might be a good idea. Actually, if the CIA stuck to intelligence efforts, they could probably do good work. But every James Bond wannabe has a half-assed idea and no one ever seems to say, "maybe we should rethink this."

OK, maybe they don't let every half-assed idea through. That idea is even scarier.

ttommyunger

The whole fucking outfit scares me.

Advn2rgirl

Neil Gaiman spook character to another spy guy: "How do we know the CIA wasn't behind the Kennedy Assassination? He's dead, isn't he?"

zhubajie

Surely you don't think OBL was more than a media creation? A sort of Emmanuel Goldstein? Even Brother Stair, most gullible fundie preacher in the realizes that!

First do no harm. Unless you're trying to kill somebody, in which case wreak all the havoc you want.

axmxz

Outrage fail. If only the worst CIA ever did was vaccinate kids as a way of obtaining terrorist DNA…

Fuck Toad

"Terrorist DNA"? Really?

flamingpdog

It's genetic? Does that mean we'll have to legalize terrorist marriage now?

mumbly_joe

One day soon, we may finally isolate the Terrorist gene.

hagajim

Did we vaccinate them with the smallpox virus?

SheriffRoscoe

No we gave them blankets covered with Hep B.

the_problem_child

And isn't providing free health care to Osama's kids material support for terrorism? Not to mention, socialist?

SheriffRoscoe

Wingnut talking points. They don't need your help.

MissTaken

Dammit! You win.

AJWjr.

Part of their plan to implement Obamacare over there so we don't get to implement it over here.

mumbly_joe

Vaccines are always socialism.

No, really. The whole point of vaccination campaigns is to immunize enough of a population that people who are too young or too sick or even too stupid to get vaccinated, or people for whom the vaccine doesn't "take" (which happens; I had to get a second round of Hep B vaccinations, because I didn't develop immunity after the first go around), aren't at risk of getting whatever terrible disease we're talking about. It's totally about the rest of us sucking it up a little for the good of "society", free riders included.

MissTaken

Great. As if the teabaggers didn't already think ObamaCare was evil, now it also provides free, socialist healthcare to terrorists.

Callyson

Very mixed reaction here…getting bin Laden was worth it vs. this will only make the jobs of international aid workers (real ones) even harder. Isn't international politics fun?

Billmatic

I find it distressing how many people think getting Osama wasn't a totally pointless enterprise in the first place, especially on the comments page of this den of socialism.

glamourdammerung

I am not sure what the moral outrage issue with the CIA vaccinating people in a third world country as a cover to find Osama bin Laden is exactly.

HistoriCat

Fake vaccinating. If they had used a real vaccine – why the hell not.

glamourdammerung

From what I have read, the vaccines were real, the campaign was a front.

mumbly_joe

There was an early initial campaign to provide the cover, then they switched locations and stopped providing actual vaccinations.

Incidentally, Hep B is a multi-dose vaccine, and since the campaign itself was short-lived and fictional, how much benefit do you think actually happened? And how do you think it compares to the harms owing to the degree to which this news validates the already-extant anti-vaccine paranoia in much of the developing world?

glamourdammerung

I can understand where using this type of operation for intelligence makes legitimate operations harder in some places. Though I am still not sure why we try to push vaccinations on places that do not want them in the first place. I would not be surprised if that also contributes a great deal to the suspicion some of these programs face.

mumbly_joe

Most places want them- diseases like polio are pretty nasty, and nobody likes infant mortality or lifelong disability. Problem is, some individual people or groups don't want them, because of conspiracy theories that suddenly seem a little less idiotic, and they often believe that they can free-ride off of everyone else's immunity anyway.

Which is true up to a point, but it's also true that some people are too young or too sick to get vaccinated, and that vaccines don't always take on the first try, either. And honestly, the case for widespread vaccination -other than to irradicate some truly nasty diseases- lies in protecting those people via herd immunity.

Steverino247

As long as children were actually vaccinated in the process and nobody was given sugar water or saline instead, I'm totally ok with this. I do understand that some will now view aid workers as CIA agents, but then, they already do, you see. It is disturbing that this leaked out and that's the real problem. This is just one small reason why leaks are bad, in case anybody needed that pointed out again. Pentagon Papers, I understand and supported. This? No fucking way.

flamingpdog

I just got back from the mens' room at work where I pointed it out and leaked some DNA. It was disturbing that it was coffee bean DNA and not barley and hops DNA.

pinkocommi

I sincerely hope that this news doesn't dissuade parents in Pakistan and other countries fearful of the West from allowing health care workers to vaccinate their children.

BaldarTFlagass

Especially the wanted terrorist parents.

orygoon

It's just so damn touching that bin Laden was concerned about those particular kids' welfare and all, isn't it? I confess, I just don't get terrorists. Oh, I understand the us/them mentality as a part of our wiring and all, academically, but really? (Mumbai bombings make me sad just now ((again!)), this blowing up of random strangers–strangers' kids, strange kids' parents–thing is nasty, nasty, nasty.)

Lazy Media

Aw, shaddup. They actually gave them free vaccinations that they otherwise wouldn't have had under the guise of taking DNA samples. This ain't the Tuskegee experiment.

mumbly_joe

No, they gave the first dose of a multi-dose vaccine for a little while as a cover that wouldn't actually benefit any of the recipients (because they probably won't be receiving the follow-up doses), and then switched to taking DNA samples under the guise of vaccination. It helped no one, and validated a lot of already-extant paranoia about vaccine programs abroad. See polio and Sub-Saharan African, justforinstance.

No, this actually is pretty bad, and even in the context of Tuskegee. The two things that made Tuskegee so very criminal was a) the fact that they said they were treating people, when they were, in fact, denying care and b) that they maintained the program and kept it a secret for decades. And guess what? That first item applies here: the CIA was claiming to provide vaccines, when they were actually not vaccinating, and collecting DNA samples.

Biel_ze_Bubba

Ummm…. where do you read that they stopped giving the vaccine? It's nowhere in the article cited.
They took a doc who was already running a vaccination program, and moved him and his program to Abbottabad. Pretty straightforward — you just need a plausible cover story — and no reason whatsoever to switch to a fake vaccine. (Not that there weren't ANY losers: some kids in the original location didn't get their booster shots, after the program left town.)

glamourdammerung

I see spanky is throwing a fit about the death of Osama bin Laden again.

It certainly says volumes about the Breitbart crowd when they are willing to side with Osama bin Laden just to try to justify their impotent rage over President Obama winning the 2008 election while being black.

mumbly_joe

He's also kinda illiterate, since he seems to think we're all cheerleading the CIA's actions on this one for some reason.

Biel_ze_Bubba

I can't wait to see their heads explode when he wins again in 2012.

user-of-owls

I wondered what Nurse Betty was up to these days.

MinAgain

Would it have killed the CIA to pony up for three doses of the vaccine? Then, at least, the children would have benefitted from the gross violation of their trust.

The smart thing would have been to NOT start trying to rule the world, ca. 1950.

zhubajie

The subcontinent is the last stronghold of polio in the world. WHO and Rotary International are trying to persuade suspicious people to get their kids vaccinated. Probably this stunt will only make people more suspicious. Perhaps polio will spread again. It won't just strike Dems like Franklin Roosevelt, either.

zhubajie

If our psychopathic political class were not a bunch of half-wits, they would realize that Afghans would be great allies, like the Gurkhas and Britain.

Redhead

Please PLEASE tell me that Bachmann, Palin and Newt (and of course, Cain) are running fake campaigns as the next step of this plan.